February 04, 2014

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street was one of those movies that really divided people. It was super-long, it was full of super-disgusting things, and it never fully showed its hand in regards to how you were supposed to be feeling about all of the repetitive debauchery it put up on the screen. Some people think that it’s a sharp takedown of the behavior of Wall Street executives, while others think that it’s a piece of exploitation trash, meant to do little other than glorify greed, drug abuse, and philandering. That’s a pretty wide divide to exist between opinions regarding the same movie.

What pretty much everyone can absolutely agree upon in regards to The Wolf of Wall Street, however,is that two of its lead actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, put a powerful mix of chemistry on display as they played a pair of best friends/garbage human beings—with that infamous scene where they both take too many quaaludes and wind up experiencing a drug-induced freakout making an exceptionally strong case for the theory that these guys need to team up more often so that they can keep making weird movie magic together.

And it looks like our wish has been granted. Deadline has news that Fox also sees potential in the DiCaprio and Hill pairing, so they’ve bought the rights to a story that will get them back together on set as soon as possible.

Said story is the story of Richard Jewell, or, more specifically, the story of Richard Jewell as it appeared in the Marie Brenner-penned “Vanity Fair” article about his life, ‘American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell.’ For those not aware of who Jewell is, he’s a guy who experienced quite a bit of craziness back in the 90s. Not only did the man have a lot happening on a personal level at the time, as he had recently moved back in with an ailing parent in order to care for her, and he had recently taken a security job as a first step toward trying to become a cop, but he soon found that he also had a lot happening on a global level, as he unwittingly became a lead suspect in one of the most highly-publicized FBI investigations of the decade.